Annie Gottlieb writes Camille...

Boomer Ladies Navel Gazing.

Nevermind who writes this stuff... why?

Superb evisceration of the Democrats. I, too, have indelible memories of the risky, ecstatic mysticism of the late '60s (trivialized by younger baby boomers who turned hallucinogens into party drugs) and often wonder where that mystery depth dimension went.

But there is a sense in which that spirituality was only another affluence-subsidized consumer good, the Davy Crockett coonskin cap of our adolescence. And I'm afraid what our generation meant by "freedom" turned out to be little more than the freedom from responsibility and commitment and the freedom to get it on. Adolescent demands.

That's not fair, I realize. Breaking out of rigidified, oppressive notions about race, authority, women and nature was a true and very American liberation. Too bad those insights have now rigidified into new pieties that are as codified, unimaginative and oppressive as those they overthrew.

Annie Gottlieb

What you have described is the Orc-Urizen cycle, a pattern identified by the great Romantic poet and visionary artist William Blake after the French revolution. Blake saw every radical impulse toward freedom eventually ossifying and turning back on itself in a new oppression and tyranny.

You are quite right to detect adolescent naiveté in many demands of white middle-class young people in the 1960s. We had been overprotected by our parents, who had suffered Depression and war for most of their lives and were determined to give us something better. Unfortunately, the result of this well-intended paternalism was a cultural banality and stifling conformism that the '60s tried to destroy by any means necessary.

But it is still puzzling why that dissident generation so enamored of freedom would have drifted toward today's speech codes, thought control and ideological intolerance.

Lol. And here's Camille later, in high dudgeon:
...

Yes, the snobbery about Palin's five colleges is especially distasteful, given the Democratic party's supposed allegiance to populism. Judging by the increasingly limited cultural and factual knowledge of graduates of elite schools whom one encounters working in the media, blue-chip sheepskins aren't worth the parchment they're printed on these days.

Young people forced through the ruthlessly competitive college admissions rat race have the independence and creativity pinched right out of them. Proof? Where are the major young American artists, writers, critics or movie-makers of the past 20 years? The most adventurous and enterprising minds have gone into high tech.

We're in a horrendous cultural vacuum because our status-besotted education industry is geared toward producing not original thinkers but docile creatures of the system.

"Hey kids -- get off my (campus) lawn, and make some art!"

Seriously though, maybe the young American artists, unlike in Annie and Camille's generation, don't think of art and culture as commodities, something to sell, to see and be seen, to sign one's name to.

Admit it -- there are cracks in your good lives, and perhaps the younger ones are waiting for your generation's anger and indignation to pass -- who wants to compete with that? Even poor President Obama is over his head trying to deal with the once-entitled, twice-lost generation always looking for more, and not really getting ... life. What is art, if not life? Not pinned and studied, like Camille's language pegs her. Life lived.

I think you're seeing the next ones step up, but not in the footsteps laid out by those who went before. Trails are good, picturesque even, but going off grid ... and bringing something back: Might not be a bear kill, but trust me, it will be just as good nourishing.

Don't despair ladies. (Know hope, and all that dope.) And don't fret the "vaccum". The long view is more promising than probably you can see today ...